Alper Yilmaz

Alper Yilmaz is Professor with appointments in Civil Environmental and Geodetic Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering (courtesy) Departments at The Ohio State University. He serves as Director of PCVLab and is currently interim president for the ISPRS Technical Commission II. Dr. Yilmaz has been inducted to the U.S. National Academy of Inventors in 2020 and is a Fellow of the American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) and senior member of IEEE.

Dr. Yilmaz's research focuses on biomimetic navigation systems for unmanned systems, mining anomalies in multi-physics and multi-dimensional data for surveillance, and learning geospatial information for scene understanding. His expertise spans Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Computer Vision, Photogrammetry, Data-centric Surveillance, Collaborative Swarm Navigation, and Indoor Positioning Systems. His recent work on biomimetic navigation systems has resulted in UbiHere Inc., an Ohio State University spin-off founded in 2018.

Dr. Yilmaz has served as Editor-In-Chief for the Photogrammetric Engineering and Remote Sensing Journal (PE&RS) between 2016-2024, during which the journal's impact factor increased to its highest since 1934. He previously served as Associate Editor for Computer Vision and Image Understanding Journal (2014-2016) and Machine Vision and Applications Journal (2006-2011).

• Outstanding Service Award (2022, ASPRS)
• Innovator of Year (2020, OSU)
• Presidential citation (2019, ASPRS)
• Masao Horiba Award honorable mention (2016, Japan)
• Lumley Interdisciplinary Research Award (2015, OSU)
• Lumley Research Award (2012, OSU)
• Top 1% most cited researcher in Artificial Intelligence & Image Processing and Geological & Geomatics Engineering (2024)

Dr. Yilmaz has advised 29 Ph.D. and 15 M.Sc. students to completion on topics ranging from photogrammetry, machine learning, and computer vision. His research has received over $13M in extramural funding from NASA, NSF, DOD, DOE, NIH, and industry partners including Ford Motor Company, Trimble Inc., and UbiHere Inc. PCVLab, located in Bolz Hall Suite 233, features a sensor calibration room, state-of-the-art workstations with GPUs for deep learning studies, and small robotic systems including ground and aerial units.